Lost Doors
When the front door has gone missing, you have good options for matching style for curb appeal. Also: Vintage Doors.
Is your original front door long gone? Is the entry so altered it’s impossible to tell what used to be there? It happens a lot. The wrong front door muddles the style of the house and hurts curb appeal. Take heart: you can restore what’s gone using salvage, custom replication, or an astute purchase.
Like so much in life, what’s gone is gone and sometimes it’s not easy to replace. You may know the current door is “wrong,” but have no idea what used to be. Depending on the style and age of the house, however, it’s possible to make an educated guess as to what the door would have looked like. First, look around the neighborhood for intact doors on houses of roughly the same age, style, and degree of detail. If the house is particularly early or in a rural setting, look for examples of similar houses in the region. Another option: Consult old builder’s catalogs and online resources for designs that appear on houses similar to yours.
Details matter. As a rule of thumb, the older the door, the plainer and less detailed it would have been. The most elaborate front doors date to the late 19th century. The earliest doors were batten: rough-hewn planks or vertical boards held together with cross braces. The panel door—probably the most common door type—first appeared with the Georgian style, circa 1715. Old panel doors are built with vertical stiles and horizontal rails using mortise-and-tenon construction for a tight, durable fit. Four, six, or more panels are fitted into this interlocking framework
entry doors had become more standardized in size and configuration. Various architectural revivals offered a grab bag of style details. Still, it was common to find the same door on a Colonial Revival house and on a Tudor, with only the hardware chosen used to differentiate between them. to permit the wood to move as it shrinks and swells with changes in the weather.
Depending on era, panels can be almost pancake flat—at right angles to perfectly flat stiles and rails—or raised: angled or beveled away from the flat parts of the door surface. Georgian raised-panel doors, for example, tend to have a slightly shallower and more rounded profile than Federal-era doors. The angles on Greek Revival doors are significantly taller and narrower than either Georgian or Federal. Since “Colonial” has been in constant revival ever since, these differences were smoothed out and refined over time, with the result that the profiles on early-20thcentury panel doors are looser than the early examples.
The single paneled door doubled up to form matched pairs for such architectural styles as Second Empire, Italianate, and Queen Anne. Advances in millwork meant more elaborate use of architectural relief. Beveling and other embellishments were sometimes applied to the door itself rather than cut into the panel.
By the 1920s, builders had begun to standardize the front door in terms of configuration and size. Although each of the many revivals offered a grab bag of style characteristics, it was also fairly common to find the same door on dwellings of supposedly different styles—Colonial and Tudor, for instance—with only a change of hardware differentiating them. As for homes built after World War II, original examples abound for you to study, right in your own neighborhood. [ cont. on page 39]